Cooing couple Go right to the back of the queue, please
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UPDATED:
01:04 GMT, 6 May 2012
Do you know what sticks in my throat more than expensive hotels charging for wi-fi, and handing out access codes so long and complex I doubt an Enigma machine would be able to decipher them
More than baristas who take your money while scratching their bottoms before they even think about steaming milk More than the booming, artificial, bossy-boots noise of ‘Till Number ONE, please’
It’s the sight of all those coupley couples turning up at polling stations to cast their vote. Last week, David and Samantha Cameron even held hands! Boris Johnson and his wife were hugging – first thing in the morning!
Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha held hands while on their way to the polling stations – much to the distaste of Liz Jones
It’s disgusting. The message they are trying to put across is that being in a couple makes them decent, trustworthy, and possessors of old-fashioned family values. They clearly believe being part of a couple makes them superior.
Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, who bravely turned up to vote in the local elections alone, was roundly criticised in the papers and on news channels. The consensus being, well, where on earth was his foreign wife Curling her eyelashes Having an argument in the street while wearing a floral sprigged apron and gesticulating wildly
I imagine she was still in the kitchen, wiping up Weetabix crumbs. ‘You go ahead, Nico,’ she would have cooed. ‘I’ll wait for the electricity meter man. No one will notice if I’m not there. I’ll vote for you, I promise. What eez the name of your party again It’s the sunshine-yellow one, yes’
Whenever I walk behind a couple holding hands on the street I want to karate-chop their arms. They are a hazard. They hold me up. There is no merit in being part of a couple. Anyone can get married – look at Fred West.
I don’t understand why couples have to shop together, either: can they not divide up the tasks and then have time to actually do something interesting with their lives And far from married couples with children being the beacons of acceptable responsibility, well, I think the opposite is true.
Meanwhile Boris Johnson and his wife Marina Johnson hugged after casting their votes
Mums only empathise with the likes of the McCanns because they think: ‘What if the same thing happened to my child’ They never think ‘that child’.
I truly believe it is the single and child-free who should be given the tax incentives and the kudos.
I’m always so tempted to add graffiti to all those ‘mother and baby’ parking spaces near shop doors: ‘For the express use of taxpayers who don’t burden the system with childbirth and the need for schools. Anyone on a year’s maternity leave please go to the longest queue at the back of the store near the bins: you clearly have no work ethic.’
Nick Clegg's wife Miriam was criticised for not showing up to support her husband
But it is middle-class couples I hate the most: the postpartum women with porridge-textured tummies and cupcake recipe cards on the table rather than anything stimulating, women whose husbands – playing porn on the inside of their eyelids – look on benignly as their shiny-haired children squirt bottled milk into cushions and scribble on walls with delightful, chalky organic paint.
I look at coupley couples and wonder how much sex they are having. My real joy came last week when a US survey revealed that men in the more affluent couples are the most likely to cheat, especially when they have been dethroned by children.
Men, mewling babies that they are, resent the attention their wives give to children, but also (here’s the middle-class part) rail against their own obligation to be good, involved fathers who not only know how to work a central-heating timer, but cook, clean up and put a coloured wash on while taking the children to nursery.
The survey (OK, it was commissioned by extramarital dating website Ashley Madison) also found affluence ‘is associated with lower ethical behaviour’. One area of Brooklyn, famed for its helicopter parenting, is ‘a very undersexed neighbourhood’. Yes! That’s your just deserts for scuffing my shoes with your pushchairs.
Husbands and fathers develop ‘male martyr complex’, bullied at work and at home, and crave something private and naughty that cannot be monitored, where they feel like a king.
I far more admire couples who are not joined at the hip. My role model at the moment is Hillary Clinton, who failed to tell husband Bill that special forces were about to assassinate Obama Bin Laden. I love that.
I think the Queen has the protocol exactly right, too. She and the Duke do not turn up at functions wearing matching Boden, arm in arm, hugging. He walks, respectfully, several paces behind. That’s far more like it.